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Rick Stroud

on women of the SOE

Mr. Stroud is the author of ‘Kidnap in Crete: The True Story of the Abduction of a Nazi General.’
Photo:
Neal Spence

The Wolves at the Door

By Judith L. Pearson (2005)

1. Ms. Pearson’s electric narrative opens in France at the end of March 1944. Two frail old people, a man and a woman, stumble along a rutted country road. They wear wooden clogs and worn-out clothes, and each carries a battered suitcase. Their destination is a railroad station, where they hope to board a train for Paris. It is cold, the wind howls and it looks as though they might not make it. They are in fact American spies. The woman is Virginia Hall, a 38-year-old agent and one of the most important spies in the country. In 1933 she had lost her leg in a hunting accident and christened her false limb “Cuthbert.” By 1941 she was in Vichy France posing as an American journalist while working for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE). She was so successful that in 1942 she had to flee to England, escaping on foot over the Pyrenees. The head of the Gestapo in Lyons, which had mistaken her nationality, said that he “would give anything to get my hands on that Canadian bitch.” By March 1944 she was back in France and by D-Day was in Normandy commanding 2,000 Resistance fighters. When she won the Distinguished Service Cross in 1945, President Truman proposed presenting it to her personally. She declined, explaining that she was “still operational and most anxious to get busy.”

The Spy Who Loved

By Clare Mulley (2012)

2. Christine Granville was Polish and an early recruit to the SOE. A fellow agent described her as “the bravest person I ever knew. . . . She can do anything with dynamite, except eat it.” Another said that she had an “almost mesmeric attraction for men.” One agent she spurned in love tried to kill himself by jumping in the Danube, not noticing that it was frozen—a characteristically memorable detail among many assembled for this portrait. On the run in Poland, she was arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo. She escaped by feigning tuberculosis, biting her tongue to draw blood, which she pretended to cough up. On July 7, 1944, she was parachuted into France, where she fought alongside 4,000 Resistance fighters against 10,000 Germans. Stopped at gunpoint by enemy soldiers, she supposedly raised her hands to reveal that she was holding two grenades with the pins out, then escaped. Her most astonishing achievement came toward the end of the war, when she walked into a German prison and persuaded the Gestapo to release three British agents. For her work she won the George Cross. After the war one SOE agent said, “I am going to make sure that I keep on Christine’s side in future,” to which a comrade replied, “So am I. She frightens me to death.”

All the King’s Men

By Robert Marshall (1988)

3. Robert Marshall’s riveting work concerns triple agent Henri Déricourt, a charmer and a ruthless liar. In 1941 he was a small-time crook in Paris retained as an informer by two SS intelligence officers. A year later he was in London and had talked his way into SOE. He had high-level support in the form of a prewar contact now working for MI6 who endorsed him, saying “Déricourt is first class material.” One senior member of SOE, on the other hand, reported that “when I saw him my heart sank. . . . he wasn’t a man that I could trust.” Nevertheless, Déricourt was sent to France as the SOE Air Operations Officer. Within three days he was in touch with the Germans, delivering his new Resistance comrades into captivity to be tortured, sent to concentration camps and murdered. Many captured female agents were betrayed by Déricourt. After the war he was arrested but somehow acquitted, thanks in part to his friend in MI6, who served as a defense witness.

Spy Princess

By Shrabani Basu (2006)

4. Shrabani Basu tells one of the saddest stories of World War II secret agents. Noor Khan was a gentle, kind soul, the daughter of a Sufi mystic who would wake her with singing. She was an idealist, an educated woman who spoke fluent French and wrote children’s books. In 1943 she was recruited into SOE as a radio operator. Her instructors described her as “clumsy, frightened of weapons and not suitable for the work.” Nevertheless Khan was sent to Paris, now an extremely dangerous place because the Resistance networks there had been penetrated by German intelligence. As circumstances worsened, Khan was recalled, but she refused to leave her post. Betrayed and arrested soon after, she became a “Night and Fog” prisoner—the sort who disappeared into a hellish captivity. Shackled hand and foot, kept in solitary confinement, starved and tortured, she betrayed no comrade, gave up no names. Her short life ended in Dachau, where she was shot in the head. Her last word was “Liberté.”

A Life in Secrets

By Sarah Helm (2005)

5. Vera Atkins, a Hungarian-born British citizen, was intelligent, secretive and blessed with a photographic memory. Recruited to serve as a secretary, she ended up, by force of her drive and personality, as SOE’s de facto second in command. She took it upon herself to oversee the female agents and was often the last person they saw before leaving for France. Of the 37 women she saw off, 12 never returned. When the war ended, Atkins embarked on a mission to find out what had happened to them. There were aspects of her life that were mysterious—enough to raise speculation that she was a double agent working for the Russians and that her search for the missing agents was a cover. Ms. Helm’s harrowing book is a wonderful piece of detective work—one that explores both the horrific fate of the missing women and the enigma that was Atkins herself.